Embrace (34 page)

‘Below the ford.’

‘In the bush?’

He nodded, perpetuating the smile.

‘Aren’t you cold?’

‘Fire, Karl’tjie, fire keeps one warm. And when it rains there are the forts. Some nice buildings you boys have down there. Yours is nice. Strong and neat. And soon the days will be warm. Summer is coming.’

Oh my God. No. No. I smell kaffir, the ash! He’s going into our fort! No, this is too much. He must go. ‘How did you know which one, the fort, which one is mine, Uncle Klaas?’ I tried to smile, to hide the terror and anger.

‘I’ve been watching you for a while.’

Every time he spoke my heart sank. Sneaking through the bushes, spying on me and my friends, living in my — our — fort.
And soon the days will he warm, summer is cominglThat
could mean only one thing: he’s planning to stay! For who knows how long!

‘Come with, you can see the day place. You can visit there, it’s safe.’

‘Uncle Klaas, I want to, but, they’ll throw you off the farm . . .’

‘Only if they find us! And if they chase me, then I can always comeback. I always do. Come,’ and he advanced from the cover of the tree, walked by me: a whiff of him, acrid, bitter, smoky. Kaffir. ‘It’s at least an hour before the whistle will blow.’

‘Uncle Klaas . . .’ I began to protest, but he walked on, the baggy brown slacks swishing through the oliebosse and kakibush. He was not like a man hiding, more like a king who owned the place. I trotted after him, casting glances behind me.

‘What’s that you’re reading?’

‘Gone With the Wind
.’

He snorted: ‘Crap. Who told you to read such rubbish?’ And without waiting for an answer: ‘Proust, Goethe, Wilde, Cesaire, Woolf, Dickinson, Hughes, Whitman . . . If you want to read, why not decent stuff ?’ Names I had never heard. ‘Have you learnt to control your boisterousness? I hope not!’ He laughed over his shoulder. ‘Uncle Klaas, please, you must speak softly.’

We strode on in silence, cut south, away from the school, then across the river above our fort. Into the broad daylight he strutted, across the open veld on the other side of the stream. I wanted to weep. Out. Out. Out. In the open.

‘Don’t be scared,’ he laughed, as if reading my mind, ‘you can always tell them I’m family. Your uncle. Your great-uncle. Surely family has a visitation right?’ He strolled on, not waiting for an answer again, clearly not expecting one either. Merely terrorising me.

‘You’re getting big. You could be a wrestler, you know. Do you and Lena still wrestle?’

‘No. We stopped.’

‘Pity. She’s a strong girl. Why did you stop?’

‘She got breasts.’

‘She used to beat you.’

‘Not after she got tits. I use to hit her on her tits and that stopped the wrestling because Bokkie said she’d get breast cancer.’

‘I saw your mum a few weeks ago in Toti.’

‘She wrote . . .’

‘You have a beautiful mother, you know that?’

‘Yes. I know.’

‘Just so insecure. Very insecure. Pity. And so long-suffering. Martha the Martyr. Her selflessness will drive you crazy.’

‘... Uncle Klaas?’The answer was of little interest to me. I would rather have silence, but while we spoke I could try and forget about any number of eyes that may be upon me. De Man and the tramp. Did you guys see De Man crossing the veld with a white tramp? Uncle Klaas rambled on about my mother choking on her silence, always feeling sorry for herself while pretending to be happy, being too dependent on Bok. About Bok being a woman’s man with more charm than was good for any one soul. His torn shoes showed red socks, a tear in the calf of his one leg. And I could again smell him. If Bennie knew that this was the pong in our fort! The further we went the greater grew my revulsion and anger at the creature striding ahead of me. Who does he think he is, coming here and speaking like this about my family? He hardly knows us, sees us once a year.

‘Your father,’ he continued, ‘is a basic shit. Not unlike most of the world, I suppose.’

If he didn’t stop I was going to turn around and walk away. How dare he — human dregs that he is — come here and talk about Bok in this way? He’s mad! Only a beggar. A vulture. Coming scavenging from the family whenever he needed money or food. Well, you won’t get a blue dime from me. Anyway, you wouldn’t be able to use Hills. As we approached the V Forest road I begged him to wait, to make certain no one was approaching; the riders could be returning at any moment. He chuckled but granted my request. When it was clear there was no one on the road, we crossed into the cluster of pines downstream from the bridge.

‘Uncle Klaas, I must go back. The whistle will blow and I’ll pick up serious trouble.’

‘And then of course cheating those black peasants with this curio business.’

‘Bok doesn’t cheat them. He creates work for them. Job opportunities and he has to make a profit. Uncle Klaas, I must go back.’

‘Were almost there, just come so that you can see where to come and visit.’

Mad! He is crazy. Out of his bracket if he thinks I’ll set foot near him, ever again.

Below the ford, between where one could still hear the rush of water from the sluices and above the wattles where the kleilat fights happened, he made his way through the reeds and a thick grove of bulrushes. Uncle Klaas leading me into the bush. We stood in a small clearing amongst the reeds. Nothing except a bundle of clothes and empty tins of curried fish; the evidence of a fire; reeds flattened where obviously he had been sleeping. A blanket; a plastic Pick and Pay bag. Horrible. How could he live like this.

‘We need another blanket.’

‘You have a blanket,’ I said, pointing. ‘You don’t need another.’

He inclined his head to the reeds, shifted his gaze from me to there. I followed his eyes. The book almost dropped from my grip. There, behind the lush green stalks and leaves, was a black face, glistening yellowish eyes. I stared for only a moment. I turned on the man beside me. Terror, outrage. I shook my head. I was ready to weep. Suddenly I whispered: ‘Fuck off, Uncle Klaas. I didn’t invite you here. Go away. Don’t ever send me little notes again. Fuck off out of my life.’

I turned and I ran, turned left on the road, crossed the drif, ran through the poplar forest to where the first forts began. Here I slowed down and began to walk; clutching the book to my heaving chest. Thinking of the mad gene.

On a rock below the old pump-house I sat down, panting, trying to expel Uncle Klaas from my mind. And the other one. That he brings a black man here! I strolled back towards our fort, past a group of Juniors playing touch rugby, looking around, wondering whether we had been seen. Mervyn and Bennie were gone from ourfort. Across, below the cliffs on the other side, white flowers had begun to bloom. I stretched my neck, squinted to see what they were. Had not noticed them there before. Some sort of wild iris, perhaps. Opened the book — marked by a pressed vine leaf at page 56 — and tried to read. I had forgotten everything, everything the book was about. Go back to the first line, the beginning. What a marvellous sentence:
Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realised it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.
What an original beginning! What
is
he doing here! When I write my first book, I will begin with a sentence of high originality such as this, so that the reader is caught, spellbound, compelled to read on. That’s so clever, so memorable. Beginnings; so very, very important.

Bok, Jonas and Boy went on elephant patrol to Ndumu and Mozi. A young Bantu had come to HQ to say a lone bull had come marauding from Mozambique and was raiding the maize and madumbi. Two women had been hurt and a village plundered.

Late afternoon Bok and the boys stumbled unexpectedly into an encampment of rhino poachers. One of the poachers reached for his gun and fired a shot that struck Jonas in the arm. Boy fired and killed the poacher. They rounded up the rest of the gang, put on the handcuffs and walked them to HQ from where they were taken to the cells in Empangeni. Jonas’s arm wasn’t too badly injured and I went with him and Bok to hospital in Empangeni to have the bullet extracted. He was given eight stitches in his arm. When Bok removed the black thread with pliers a few weeks later the scar was blue and shiny; smooth and wrinkly to the touch of my fingers. Bernice’s belly scar had since gone from red, to pink, to light brown; the same smooth skin with tiny, tiny wrinkles.

I went to visit Jonas and Boy at the kraal. Jonas made the littlemasks and statues that Bok gave to Aunt Siobhain to sell to the curio shops in Durban. Boy made grass place mats, some of them decorated with small beads or interwoven with colourful pieces of wool. I grab a mask and a grass place mat and run away with Jonas and Boy calling after me to return their things. Jonas follows me as I run. He grabs me from behind and holds me by the shoulders.

‘No steal, Kal. Kal no steal.’ Shaking his head, frowning at me.

I burst into tears and say: ‘Mina tella Baas Bok wena shaja Kal. Bok shaja wena.’

He has done nothing more than grab me by the arm. Yet, I have threatened to tell Bok that he, Jonas, has hit me. I’m warning him that Bok will beat him. Bok will of course do no such thing, that much I know. But of my power and Jonas’s language — or rather our commanding variant of imperatives — I know enough, already at five, to threaten him even as I weep. Yet, the moment when I will grasp the meanings of our daily barbarism, the layers upon layers of brutal significance, as well as when I care enough to inquire with any measure of self-awareness about the boys and myself, that moment is a fixture telling beyond the pages bound in your hands. For now, Jonas glowers at me, leaves me with the quarry in mine. He goes back to the compound. I to Mbanyana. There I say to Bokkie that Jonas and Boy have sent gifts for us to hang from the walls of our reed lounge.

Within days I’m back with the boys, though I never plunder art from the compound again.

Mervyn was the first to be taken from prep. He didn’t come back. Then Lukas. He didn’t return either. Then Bennie. Then me. I was taken by someone — I have no memory of whom it was, a teacher, a Senior, a prefect — into the night; it was said heavy snow was falling on the mountains. With jeans and long johns — after supper the whole school had been sent upstairs to don the long underpants — we wore T-shirts, our black polo-neck jerseys and grey bush jackets. Whomever it was that fetched me from the classroom led me through the lighted quad, past the dribble of guests arriving for the Juniors’ Wednesday evening performance. The Senior Choir was set to leave for Israel’s International Festival of Choirs. It was freezing. Instead of taking me through the concert hall, I was taken around the exterior of the building, to Mathison’s outside door. The curtains were drawn. I have no recollection of how I got inside, whether I entered after a knock, or whether a voice told me to come in.

Mervyn, Lukas and Bennie’s backs stared at me. On the worn red carpet, they stood facing the desk. Mr Mathison told me to shut the door. I fell in beside Bennie. Was our dorm untidy? Had we been talking after lights out? My heart sank at the sight of the three men behind the desk. I could guess, but still hoped against hope that I was wrong. The gravity of whatever we had done was written into the three faces, the rigid postures. On the desk’s glass top, lay the bamboo cane, behind it in black leather, the Bible.

Only Mr Mathison, from his seat at the desk, spoke. His voice was sparse, wounded, sad, no anger to be found there: ‘What the four of you have been up to is beneath language.’ He paused and stared pensively at the closed door. ‘Not even animals do this.’

A flash of Miss Roos walking through the music hall.

‘How could you defile yourselves like this?’ It looked as if tears may at any moment stream down his cheeks.

Through two closed doors, the sounds of applause reached into his office. The Juniors had obviously walked onto stage in the auditorium.

‘Where do you get this disgusting behaviour from? Do you have any idea what you have done? Nowhere in the world, in no human society, is this accepted. It is the gravest sin you can ever commit... God’s Word tells us — in the New and Old Testament, Mervyn — that your kind deserves death . .. This, you know, is why God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. With fire and brimstone from heaven.’ He reached for the Bible. Opened it, paged, and read, something from somewhere about our kind deserving death. Suddenly his eyes brimmed behind the glasses, shining in the light. He cleared his throat and stood up. ‘In Sodom, every single person died except Lot and his daughters.’ Beneath my jersey and bush jacket trickles of sweat ran down my back, my sides. The headmaster was going to weep; he again cleared his throat; eyes still ready to spill tears. ‘Do you have any idea what this could do to your parents?’

This could not be happening. This, Bok, Bokkie, dear Jesus what have I done?

‘If they ever find out, do you know what it will do to them? It will kill your mothers and shame your fathers to their last breath.’ He broke off, stared each of us in the face by turn. ‘I cannot, not for a moment, believe that a parent — any parent — would want a child who has dragged himself through such filth. It would be better for you to go to orphanages. That — Lukas, Mervyn, Bennie, Karl — that is where you will be sent to perish before you burn in hell for this unspeakable act.’ The Junior Choir was singing, ‘Me Who Melech Hakavod’, the soloist’s voice a thread sliding through wood of doors, the cracks between doors and floors, doors and their frames.

Mathison came round the desk and stood in front of us. He was quiet for a while, seemed again to be searching our faces. When he spoke his tone had hardened; now he was angry; there was no longer a trace of tears. He spoke in English: ‘Let me give you an idea of the sort of life you are in for . . . There is a city in America . . .’ For the first time in my life I heard of a place called San Francisco; a place of perversion, sin and depravity; a place of satanic orgies and defilements: ‘That den of perversion is the Sodom and Gomorrah of the modern world. The kind of people who live there are the kind of people who do the unspeakable things you four have done.’ He paused and sat down on the edge of the desk. I blinked away tears. ‘But, as providence would have it,’ Mathison went on, ‘in God’s all-seeingplan — that place, that city of sin, has been built on the San Andreas Fault — a fault line that runs through that entire section of America. Do you know what a fault line is? It is a defect, a flaw in the earth’s crust, that rubs against itself for hundreds of years, and then, suddenly, it shakes and trembles and the earth quakes and falls in on itself. That fault line is the key that can unlock your understanding of what you have done. And why do you think I’m telling you this? Why do I want you to dredge that fault line? Lukas? Mervyn? Bennie? Karl?’ His stare burning into our shame; his silence underscoring our profanity. He removed his glasses, and nodding at us: ‘Because the same thing is going to happen to San Francisco, the same thing that happened three thousand years ago to Sodom and Gomorrah. God will drag it into the burning recesses of the earth; it will disappear off the face of the planet, swallowed as if it had never existed.’